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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Self-Portrait Experiments

For the first lesson in my online Self-Portraits workshop we'll be starting with a photograph and tracing around it. Simple enough, right? I started by taking a few photos of myself using the automatic delay thing on the camera. Then I made them into black and whites in Photoshop, though you could use color photos. For the first two I printed them out light so that the drawing would be emphasized.Nice how you can draw lines selectively and end up looking twenty years younger!

On this one I printed the photo out without making it lighter. I drew over it and then painted it in black and white, emphasizing my gray hair:

I used my "spritz and blot" technique (contained in this video) to make the water droplets.

After you get comfortable drawing your face over a photograph, it is much easier to tackle the self-portrait on a blank sheet of paper. And there are all kinds of fun things you can do with your altered photos of yourself!!!

Im doing an All About Me book at the moment (via the Blissfully Art journaling Group) and I love this idea for a self portrait to start it off. I've worked in this way before using photos to give me line drawings, but never with self portraits (I wouldn't normally do them), this seems like a great starting point for one for this book though, thank you for sharing it!

This class sounds like a lot of fun, Jane. I wish I could participate in this or your Color course, but I'm starting an academic course around the same time and I know I wouldn't have the discipline to limit my time on a delicious art course, LOL!